Tag: MVP Award

It’s January, which means we’re coming to the end of another contribution year for those of us Microsoft MVPs that are up for renewal on July 1st. By the end of March, we need to have submitted our contributions, and new this year, answered the four magic questions on the MVP site.

This post was somewhat hard to write, to find the right tone, to express my feelings succinctly enough without seeming ungrateful for what I’ve just been awarded.

Yesterday, I received the official news from Microsoft that I had been awarded with an MVP Award for the 2018/2019 period, my first “renewal”. Leading up to yesterday, there were a tremendous amount of messages, emails and social media threads among the various channels that MVPs communicate in (some official, some not) where people were announcing they weren’t getting renewed. Included in this were several within my own award category, Business Solutions, within my own peer group of those focusing on Dynamics GP.

At the end of April, I thought I would do an experiment. I kept track of nearly every email that I received as a part of the MVP program for the entire month of May. I deleted nothing. However, some emails such as calendar invites are auto-deleted in Outlook once you accept or decline the invitation, so I may be missing a few. (I know you can change that behaviour in Outlook but I didn’t want to change my normal settings for the sake of an experiment!)

As a Microsoft MVP, depending on how many Distribution Lists (DLs) you subscribe you, you may get a LOT of emails. I was curious to keep track of exactly how many on a random month. May was that month!

There is no “one” reference point since every MVP will customize what DLs they subscribe to, if any, and what other forms of communications their product group prefers to use. For this post, my reference point, I subscribe to 2 DL’s in Business Solutions, which for the sake of NDA I will call “the primary one” we are all told we should follow and one for my own product group, Dynamics GP. Those in Business Solutions will know what I mean.

There are 7 different DLs in Business Solutions, not including ones marked as “Retired”. I also subscribe to 1 Data Platform DL, out of 16 in that award category. There is absolutely no way to effectively keep up with the information if I chose to subscribe to more, let alone what I already subscribe to, so, I must limit myself to a handful of DLs to keep sane!

When we receive the Microsoft MVP Award, the first thing after “accepting” the award officially is signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Each time our award is renewed, we must acknowledge, accept and sign it again.

That NDA is an individual agreement between Microsoft and ourselves as an individual, not our company or employer, not our family, but us, individually. Additionally, even though all MVPs have signed the NDA agreement, we are not to share NDA information with other MVPs without pre-approval or through authorized NDA channels. I’m getting this part verbatim from the MVP site, by the way, to avoid mistakenly describing something in my own words that aren’t precisely true.

I’m fortunate to be attending my 2nd Microsoft MVP Summit, in Bellevue & Redmond, Washington. The first one I attended was in November 2016, shortly after I was first awarded my MVP award. It was pretty overwhelming! I was still getting used to the idea that I was an MVP let alone being able to absorb all of the content presented to us.

There was no MVP Summit in 2017, as the program was reorganized in early 2017 to change everyone to a single renewal date. In doing so, the date for Summit was changed to what I assume is now the permanent time of year from now on.

One year ago, I was notified via email of my first Microsoft MVP Award. It was a pretty surreal moment! I captured some of my thoughts and emotions in a blog post last year.

Now that a year has gone by, very quickly I might add, it’s time to look back at my first year as a Microsoft MVP. I’ve put together some thoughts on my year, and some things that may help other first timers in their journey too.Continue reading “My First Year as an MVP, part 1”

In case you hadn’t heard, February 27 to March 3, 2017 is Women in Technology week! Next Wednesday is International Women’s Day (Wednesday March 8, 2017), which, according to the official website, is “a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women”.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize that it was Women in Tech week this week until my Microsoft MVP team contacted me a few weeks ago, telling me about some different events I could attend or take part in. My bad… I am in technology but being an accountant by trade, I don’t always think of myself as a “woman in tech”. I’m not sure why exactly but I guess I am not one to label myself as I hate feeling like I have to fit into a certain box! I’ve been interested in tech since I was a kid, from learning to program on my Commodore 64, to learning Visual Basic (or was it just Basic) in high school, to writing my own VB.net windows app to track my NFL picks with a friend. I’m a geek through and through, no doubt about it!Continue reading “Women in Tech Week 2017 & Female MVPs”

Technically, I don’t think today ‘s schedule was considered to be the first day but the keynote was this afternoon, so with this re-write, I am now just calling it Keynote Day. Confused? Yes it was a little but I’m assuming the rest of the conference is now Days 1 to 3. I give up labelling days since I goofed once already! 🙂

For the morning, it was a quiet start to the day. It was a nice day, as it has been every day in Tampa, but today there was a nice breeze to keep it cooler than it was the previous couple of days. So, I walked to the convention centre area and funnily enough, I arrived at the front of the convention centre at the exact moment that Tim Wappat was standing there waiting for his shuttle to the hotel. I hadn’t met Tim yet although we have chatted quite a bit on Twitter, so I was looking forward to meeting him! We chatted for a bit until his shuttle bus arrived and then went our separate ways.Continue reading “GPUG Summit 2016 – Keynote Day”